We’re going inside the male supremacy movement. This post is the third in a series produced by ADL in partnership with Ms. In each installment, we will explore a different aspect of what we’re calling the “male supremacy movement”—a network of formal groups and informal communities dedicated to subjugating women—and its intersections with the so-called alt-right’s racism.
In 2017, famously publicity-averse white supremacist and alt-right figure Greg Johnson was caught on tape airing his views on women’s reproductive rights and bodily agency.
“Get rid of all voluntary birth control,” he told Patrik Hermansson, who spent a year undercover with—and often recording—members of the so-called alt-right, an umbrella term encompassing white supremacists and nationalists, neo-Nazis and other extremists. “Voluntary birth control means that people who are far-sighted and responsible restrict their fertility, and people who are impulsive and stupid don’t. So you can’t leave birth control up to the individual.”
Johnson decried the trend of women having children later in life, and offered a solution to maintain the viability of the white race. “Women are postponing childbearing because of education and their careers,” he said. “Say you give a woman a free year of education for every child she bears and takes care of in the home up to the age of six. Okay, so maybe by the time she’s 30 she’s ready to go off to college or something.”
Johnson’s opinion is fairly prevalent in alt-right circles. Alt-right figurehead and founder of altright.com Richard Spencer told Newsweek he’s not sure women should have the right to vote. Matt Forney wrote:
As men, it is our responsibility to bring girls back to their proper place. To lead them into their natural roles as wives and mothers. We men do not choose or reward girls for their clown college degrees, their meaningless cubicle jobs or their supposed “intelligence.” We reward them for their willingness to please us and make us happy, and in doing so make themselves happy. No amount of phony education or career “success” will scratch that deep itch in a girl’s soul: the desire to serve a man.
In June 2017, the white supremacist group Vanguard America promoted their “women’s division” in a tweet. “The woman has her own battlefield,” they posted. “With every child that she brings into the world, she fights her battle for the nation. Strong nations grow from strong families.”
A recent exchange on the altright.com message board headlined “The Woman Question”—an echo of the ubiquitous white supremacist “Jewish Question”—asked participants to weigh in on women’s functionality. One poster responded: “Seriously, the only role women play in this movement is donating their husband’s money.”
As another a poster put it: “[Women] should be building their own cells and collaborating to relearn the noble art of motherhood and only as a secondary activity, spread the gospel of femininity over feminism to a female audience.”
Others are slightly less genteel in their assessment of women’s biological value—like Sam Woodward, the 20-year-old Atomwaffen Division member who is accused of the brutal 2018 murder of 19-year old Blaze Bernstein, likely driven by anti-semitism and homophobia. As he wrote:
I would vigorously bone the living hell out of my English teacher, like holy f***. I don’t care if it’s miscegenation. That babe would be pregnant as f*** year after year, around the clock, acting as a hub of genetic imperialism…
